“If I seem a little nervous, it’s because I’ve never been this close to a real-life Loch Ness monster before. But I’ll wager you’ve never been this close to a real-life gargoyle, either. Guess that kind of makes us even.” — Angela

When it was first suggested that I write a “Why I Like…” post about David Xanatos, I decided to punt, for two reasons. First, I was not certain that I had anything interesting or new to say about the character. Second, I was, and currently am, undergoing a process of reevaluating whether or not I actually like him. So I’m doing something a bit different here and allowing some criticism to spill into my thoughts.

David Xanatos is in many ways the breakout star of Gargoyles, and possibly the one single element that caused the most impact on subsequent works. He shouldn’t be—that distinction, in a righteous world, would have gone to Elisa Maza—but there’s no denying that he’s become far bigger than the show that spawned him. And its not hard to see why: although not, technically speaking, the first of his kind—the Lex Luthor seen in season 1 of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman has a crapload of similarities, and had his heyday a year before Gargoyles debuted—he nevertheless opened up the world of western animation, by showing a new type of villain the medium hadn’t really seen before. While he hasn’t been replicated, big bads in general have become more like him, and the character itself has become synonymous with cultured, manipulative, clever villainy.

Okay, so we’re told in “City of Stone” that Xanatos planned to steal one minute of life from anyone who watched his broadcast. Assuming that he can only draw one minute from one person whenever the spell is cast, this means he needs:

60 people to see and hear the spell in order to get an hour.

1,440 people to do the same in order to gain a day.

525,600 in order to gain a year

5,256,000 in order to gain a decade.

525,600, 000 in order to get a millennium.

The population of New York City in 1995 was 7,658,000, according to this document; assuming that the plan was always to leave the broadcast up for a day, it’s possible–or at least plausible–for Xanatos to hit the target for a decade of extra life, and for him to do so repeatedly over an extended period of time (although how he’d do so without somebody noticing a pattern would take some doing). However, given Demona’s much more high target, there’s absolutely no way such a spell could have ever been responsible for her longevity.